IEEE VIS 2024 Content: The Role of Metacognition in Understanding Deceptive Bar Charts

The Role of Metacognition in Understanding Deceptive Bar Charts

Antonia Schlieder - Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

Jan Rummel - Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

Peter Albers - Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

Filip Sadlo - Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

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Room: Bayshore I

2024-10-14T16:00:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-14T16:00:00Z
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Metacognition is a feature of the cognitive system to monitor and control its cognitive processes. Consequently, one can describe metacognition as the human ability to reflect, to think about thinking, and to adapt our thinking when we deem it necessary. Truncating the y-axis of a bar chart can make the visualization deceptive in terms of certain visual reasoning tasks. In an experiment, we show that metacognitive processes are involved in understanding deceptive bar charts, i.e., that reasoners who are able to reflect on and adjust their strategies can improve their performance even without feedback on the correctness of their answers.
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Abstract

The cognitive processes involved in understanding and misunderstanding visualizations have not yet been fully clarified, even for well-studied designs, such as bar charts. In particular, little is known about whether viewers can improve their learning processes by getting better insight into their own cognition. This paper describes a simple method to measure the role of such metacognitive understanding when learning to read bar charts. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in which we investigated bar chart learning repeatedly, and tested how learning over trials was effected by metacognitive understanding. We integrate the findings into a model of metacognitive processing of visualizations, and discuss implications for the design of visualizations.